My Journey

The map shows Lenin’s route across a continent at war. A hundred years later, my journey traced it very closely, though the landscapes and the politics are obviously different (the train times, however, are not necessarily faster). To follow me along the line, click on the stations that are underlined in brown.

Zürich April 9th

The house on Spiegelgasse where the Lenins lived in 1917. A plaque proudly records their stay, but the street itself feels broad and light because the buildings opposite have been demolished.

It took me less than five minutes to walk from Lenin’s apartment to his beloved Central Library, still going strong a hundred years after he left.

Zürich railway station in all its triumphant splendour. This was the building Lenin would have known. The twenty-first century part is largely hidden underground.

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Singen April 10th

The trains may be new, but Singen station is still overshadowed by the Maggi factory across the tracks.

Berlin April 11th

The German Democratic Republic presided over Berlin’s rail network for years after the Second World War. Today, however, the city’s main station is a vast web of glass that could be said to testify to Leninism’s ultimate eclipse.

The shadows of Communist tyranny have become so faint that the crowds around the Brandenburg Gate are amused by the old Trabants that now seem to be kept exclusively for tourists.

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Sassnitz April 12th

Photographed on 12 April 2015, this view of Rügen Island has hardly changed in a hundred years. On 12 April 1917, it would have been the last sight Lenin ever had of German soil.

Malmö April 12th

The library in the Malmö Savoy is said to have been more or less preserved, which is not true of much of the old place. The building where the Russian revolutionaries enjoyed their feast on 12 April 1917 was an office block for a while and briefly housed the local headquarters of Price Waterhouse Coopers.

The brass plaque in the lobby of Malmö’s Savoy Hotel. Lenin’s name is snappy enough on the list of distinguished guests, but it is not quite the shortest. The honours there must go to Abba.

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Stockholm April 13th

The famous PUB department store, where Lenin shopped and Garbo showed off ladies’ hats. Still recognisable on the outside, it closed for business in 2015 and was about to be converted into another hotel when this photograph was taken that April.

PUB may have closed, but Stockholm is attempting to remember it with these tiled installations on the street nearby.

Haparanda April 14th

The Tornionjoki River from the Haparanda side. Compare this frozen landscape with the pictures of Zürich in spring, taken only five days previously.

A rail bridge across the river was finally completed in 1919. It is painted white from the Finnish side to the international border and blue from there to the Swedish side. Imposing though it is, there are still no passenger trains across it.

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Tornio April 15th

The Alatornio church is part of a World Heritage Site, so this picture, taken from the Swedish bank, may well reflect what Lenin saw as he snatched his first glimpse of Russian territory in April 1917.

The railway station at Tornio. Opened in 1903, and fully functional in Lenin’s time, the building now is ghost-like and devoid of passengers.

The plaque commemorating Lenin's ride through Tornio station was put up by the Soviet government on the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution that he planned and led.

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St. Petersburg April 16th

The Lenin statue at the Finland Station, now the centre of a public park. Little remains of the original station buildings, which were bombed during the Second World War in an epic clash between Lenin’s brand of Soviet Communism and Hitler’s Nazism.

However weary he may have been after eight days on the train, Lenin’s first stop in Petrograd was Bolshevik headquarters: the requisitioned mansion of the ballerina Mathilde Kshessinskaya. He used the balcony to make a speech to late-night crowds out on the street.

Last stop: the bathroom at the apartment where Lenin was to live until July 1917. His host was his brother-in-law, Mark Elizarov.

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‘The German war leaders… turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia’-